Time Strategies and Whether I'll Use Them (The Answer is Hopefully)

When I first started out in college, I was the kind of person who was obsessive about scheduling. In my phone and on paper I laid out not just classes, shifts at work, and marching band times, but also when I should study what subject. I’d heard that for every one hour of credit a class was worth, you should spend 3 hours studying the material outside of class every week. I took that literally, and drew out my schedule so that I was to spend 9 hours studying for a three hour class, 15 hours for a 5 hour class, and so on. 

In the end, turns out that’s not quite sustainable. And that scheduling that amount of time doesn’t really help if you’re not doing anything productive. Not necessarily that I would just sit on my laptop the whole time and call it studying, but rather that I would waste time doing stuff like copying down notes on stuff I already knew, or studying in a slow, ineffective way. Everyone’s heard the saying “work smarter, not harder.” I was doing the opposite. 

Now that I’m a super senior, I need to try and regain some of those study habits (but not to that extent). For me, things like getting out of the house to study, such as to a coffee shop, are good, since it’s too easy for me to get distracted at home. There are also apps that I use to keep me focused, like one that blocks me from getting on my phone for a set amount of time. That way I can say, “I need to focus on X for 20 minutes, then I can take a break.”

As far as the articles offered, one of the ones I liked was The Important Habit of Just Starting. This doesn’t apply only to academic things, but to most things in life. Whether it’s just starting to clean your room, or do the dishes, once you start, you can usually keep going. Sometimes it’s hard to find the energy to do so, though. 

Another article that I liked was Realistic Study Plans. The article explains the best way to find a good study plan by working in time around other things, and making sure that you divy up tasks realistically (like not assuming you can write a three page paper in an hour). This reminds me of other things I’ve read, about how dividing up a large task into its smaller components can be better than just trying to tackle the large task in the long run. 

I do already have a planner I like to use for everything, I just need to sit down and fill it out (first week of school is always a little wonky for scheduling, so I wait until everything settles down, especially since I like to write in pen). Hopefully I’ll be able to have a semester that’s a little better executed than last semester.

Me without any kind of a planner/calendar. Source